Apple M3 Pro 11-Core vs AMD Ryzen 9 5950X

Apple M3 Pro 11-Core

The Apple M3 Pro 11 Core is a system on a chip (SoC) from Apple for notebooks that was introduced late 2023. It integrates 11 of the 12 CPU cores with 5 of 6 performance cores with up to 4.06 GHz and 6 efficiency cores with 2.8 GHz.

Compared to the M2 Pro the M3 Pro has been slimmed down somewhat and swaps two performance cores for efficiency cores. This is due to the changed core configuration, as 6 cores are now used per cluster (the M2 Pro and M3 still have 4 cores per cluster). Furthermore, the memory bus has been reduced from 256 bits to 192 bits (150 GB/s vs. 200 GB/s). Thanks to the new architecture and higher clock rates, the new M3 Pro is still slightly faster.

The M3 Pro also integrates a new graphics card with dynamic caching, mesh shading and ray tracing acceleration via hardware. In the entry-level model, only 14 of the chip's 18 cores are used and support up to 3 displays simultaneously (internal and 2 external).

GPU and CPU can jointly access the shared memory on the package (unified memory). This is available in 18 or 36 GB variants and offers 150 GB/s maximum bandwidth (192 bit bus).

The integrated 16-core Neural Engine has also been revised and now offers 18 TOPS peak performance (compared to 15.8 TOPS in the M2 but 35 TOPS in the new A17 Pro). The video engine now also supports AV1 decoding in hardware. H.264, HEVC and ProRes (RAW) can still be decoded and encoded.

Unfortunately, the integrated WLAN only continues to support WiFi 6E (no WiFi 7), unlike the small M3 SoC thunderbolt 4 is also supported (max 40 Gbit/s).

The chip is manufactured in the current 3nm process (N3B) at TSMC and contains 37 billion transistors (-7.5% vs. Apple M2 Pro).

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X

The AMD Ryzen 9 5950X is a high-end 16-core, hyperthreaded (SMT) Vermeer Series desktop processor. With 32 threads, the new flagship offers as many threads as the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X. Introduced on October 8, 2020, the Ryzen 9 5950X is the fastest 16-core processor and is specified at 105 watts TDP.

The Ryzen 9 5950X runs at 3.4 GHz to 4.9 GHz (single core). Wen all 16 cores are loaded, up to 4.5 GHz are still possible.

The internal structure of the processor has not changed fundamentally at first glance. The CCX structure has changed a bit compared to Zen 2, because now a CCX consists of up to 8 CPU cores. So each individual core can access the complete L3 cache (32 MByte). Furthermore the CCX modules are connected to each other via the same I/O die, which we already know from Zen2. According to AMD, the Infinity fabric should now reach clock rates of up to 2 Ghz, which in turn allows a RAM clock of 4,000 MHz without performance loss.

Performance

The average 5950X in our database matches the Core i9-12900K, the Core i9-12900HX and also the Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX in multi-thread performance, making this Ryzen a great processor for pretty much any task imaginable as of mid 2022.

Power consumption

This Ryzen 9 series chip has a default TDP (also known as the long-term power limit) of 105 W. It will, however, happily consume much more than that as long as the cooling solution is able to handle the heat - even before one starts considering the possibility of overclocking the thing.

The Ryzen 9 5950X is built with TSMC's 7 nm process for average, as of mid 2023, energy efficiency.